comfort language part one

(little cairn, one of the campus 'waterfalls')

(rock in the midst of the same waterfall)

comfort language, part one (very drafty draft)

how maia told me about her dying
father, how he struggled for words
in his last moments, how he
was so restless, mouth a mask,
that silent o:

& how she couldn’t think
of any words he would understand,
(english a long forgotten shoreline)
she hunted for the yup’ik words to say to ease
his pain –

but words drowned in the mouth of the kuskokwim,
no sound in the stretch of mudflats, beaver-tail tongue
thudding in her throat –

he passed away, she said, &
there was nothing i could say to him.
he was so lonely,
like raven, when he was creating
the world –

all the other little mud-people, the strange creatures
like tigers & horses & palm trees
they spoke different language than him,
so raven scattered them all over the earth –

but i’ve got to find the yup’ik, he said
i need to gather up their words, dive
for them, swallow them singing,
the only ones i understand --

that’s when i knew i had to go
she said, to carry that yup’ik home
i need to find words again, breathe
life into their muddy hibernation,

then aata will hear me from heaven
& maybe he’ll be less alone

green gentleness

(kalyny, high-bush cranberries like a chandelier, in the river valley)

(serene white dog sitting under a tree, along 76th ave)

I truly love Joanna Newsom's long rambling epic songs; every time I listen, a new little stanza catches in my ear & settles there. This is one for the end of summer:

While down in the lowlands,

the crops are all coming;

We have everything.

Life is thundering blissful towards death

In a stampede

Of his fumbling green gentleness.

-- Joanna Newsom, 'Only Skin'

(here you can download live harp or piano versions of this song...)

reminiscing over københavn...

(oh, københavn, how i miss your fresh flowers, & the bicycles that tried to squish me as i crossed your streets...)

(how i miss hearing the guttural sounds of dansk, all those tasty swallowed vowels)

(& all your fantastical nordic architecture, including this shrieking valkyrie who looks like she coughed out a bus.

(Nothing much, just thinking about earlier this summer, & the seminar in Copenhagen.)

* * *

(poem-bits)

in copenhagen

"...that in this moment there is life and food /For future years." – William Wordsworth

in copenhagen, we talked.
talked all day during classes
over endless tea & wienerbrød

talked as we walked back
to the hostel, past cyclists
swooping over bridges,

their bells like swallows crying,
sudden & gone ringing over the canals
where we sat & talked,

swinging our legs, sipping tuborg &
eating soft-is, tour boats &
accordions moving on past --

til dinner, down strøget we tipped
over cobblestones, & feasted
on thoughts:

how everything brought us
together, our expressions &
stories & dissertations & lives

& we poured them out
like good wine, all sweet & difficult
& maddening in their complexity

you can’t describe but will
die trying all the same, because
it’s just so good to be talking,

talking with the honesty of
strangers, intensity of intimates
in an academic ecstasy, all night

our words exploding like fireworks,
we left smoke hanging over tivoli
like fields of phantom dandelions,

turning every ashy seed into a star

black earth

(red currants near astotin lake, elk island)

(farm near star, ab, south of homestead)
(nettles & wildflowers, star, ab.)

Something that I've always wondered about why there seems to be so little written in the history books (by this, meaning books & museums & cultural centres, etc) about Ukrainian and First Nations interaction in Canada. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places, but there really seems to be a lacuna in the literature, in the documentation of this. I know Dr. Klymasz (Ukrainian-Canadian folklorist) has mentioned the need for people to research it... I don't even know where they'd look, though, anyone who wants to find out about it. I've poked around on the internet, the libraries... no luck thus far. All I could find was an Alberta heritage project with a page documenting 'Aboriginal and Ethnic Minority Women' -- it mostly just comments on how both Ukrainian settlements and Aboriginal communities were targets of missionary and government policy which were attempting to 'Christianize/civilize/Canadianize' both groups, as women in both groups were not seen as 'ideals of womanhood'. And in booklets and informational materials from Kalyna Country, they talk about Ukrainian culture, French Culture, Aboriginal Culture... but never mention the links, the cross-over, or any shared influences...


I have family members who were part of the second wave of immigrants from Western Ukraine, as well as an ancestor who was first Ukrainian to ever end up in Canada, back in the 1890s -- the one who started the exodus... The end of serf-dom in Ukraine meant lots of agrarian people wanting land & wood & employment... & he heard that Canada was running around then advertising free land! free land! so he went on a scouting mission with his friend & to make a longer story much shorter, he returned to Ukraine telling everyone they should go: "We’re coming back and we’re selling everything that we have. This is Heaven compared to what we have, we’ve got to go." The Austro-Hungarian government imprisoned him for six months, charging him with 'inciting people to emigrate' but he came the following year, to the Edna-Star settlement... & hundreds followed him there to North-Central Alberta, & then to Saskatchewan, & Manitoba...


Of course, the motives of the Canadian government were to use these settlers as colonial pawns, to populate the Western part of the country, to demonstrate their sovereignty over that land, the land inhabited by the Cree & Siksika & Anishinaabe & Tsuu T'ina & Dene Suliné & Dene Tha & Métis...


Huge tracts of that first bloc settlement at Star border Saddle Lake, stretch up to the Dene community at Cold Lake... why isn't there more documentation of the links between the communities? Or did they interact much at all? I know the bloc settlements kept ethnic groups together, mostly... but surely the general proximity would have encouraged some kind of interaction, whether amicable or hostile...


No one from that first wave of immigrants is alive anymore. I know about my own extended family's links with their Métis and Cree (& French & German neighbours), links of work & marriage, but as a cultural whole, I'm curious about patterns of interaction -- the Ukrainians & the First Nations (whose land they were now farming...) I know they were both socio-politically marginalized groups at the turn of the last century... was there cooperation, alliances formed? Or did they remain separate, internally isolated?


* * *


(fragments.)


what did they think
of that strange man,
arriving somewhere north
of amiskwaciy waskahigan


standing barefoot
at the train station,
hidden in a shaggy coat,
stamping like a buffalo,
snorting in the cold --


his face, holding his daughter,
steep cheekbones like riverbanks,
his breath hanging in a foggy
ravine


that autumn they built
the burdei, buried themselves
within black earth, seeded themselves
in their new land, hoped to sprout
for a foreign spring --


*


bright kalyna, dog-star red
the trees heavy with currant earrings;
my great-grandmother weaving
the rushes into floor-mats,
singing with miss irene
in french & cree


elle est comme l'hirondelle
she's like the swallow
yes


we sing about swallows too!

bison are lovely creatures.

(bison on a hill above the road, elk island national park, last week)

(grazing mama bison with calf, by the roadside, elk island)

(milk time for the baby one, elk island)

Speaking of large land mammals, I just finished reading 'Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia', by the anthropologist Piers Vitebsky, and I adored it. It was such a gorgeous book, not only as anthropological writing, but as honest and poetic storytelling... and as a gift, a tribute to the Eveny people (and reindeer) who shared their lives & migrations with him, who taught him so much. It was tremendously compelling, and made me cry. (and also want to go to the Sakha Republic even more...)

I hope that someday I can write a book about my own future fieldwork & experiences that is so generous & well-crafted & eloquent. He lets the subjects of his book speak for themselves & weaves histories and personal narratives together in a way that is so refreshing.

My other inspiring book-writing anthropologists:

Julie Cruikshank -- Live Lived Like A Story-- Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders; Do Glaciers Listen? -- Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination
Andie Palmer -- Maps of Experience -- The Anchoring of Land to Story in Secwepemc Discourse
Keith Basso -- Wisdom Sits In Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache

The book is not my favourite, but I do give points for the title of 'Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers' by Edward Schiefflin.

till we don't be.

(alaska, again: ballaine lake on the uaf campus, 11 pm, july 27)

We could stand for a century,

Staring,

With our heads cocked,

In the broad daylight, at this thing:

Joy.

Landlocked in bodies that don't keep,

Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being,

Till we don't be.

-- Joanna Newsom, 'Emily' (mp3 here)

in alaxsxaq

billowy cloud, with aurora-like wispy edges... the skies in the tanana valley were beautiful.

smith lake, on the skarland trail on the university of alaska fairbanks campus. unknown mountain in the distance.

fringed grass-of-parnassus (such a good name), skarland trail, fairbanks.

The name 'Alaska' comes from the Aleut (Unangan) word alaxsxaq, meaning 'the mainland', or, more specifically 'the object towards which the action of the sea is directed'.

(Oh, the beauty of the specificity of deictic terms in the Inuit languages!)

In Fairbanks there was no sea, of course, but the sky was oceanic, with white-cap cloud waves and light past midnight. In summer you can't see the northern lights, but it's very comforting somehow to think of them still being there, just like Denali on the horizon, bluish and ghosty, hidden in the haze unseen but calm and there all the same.

time in the white light

{jasmine bush, just past 114th st... it sometimes takes me a long time to walk home when they're in bloom, as i am compelled to stop & bury my nose in each one i see}

{more jasmine blossoms... last week. sadly all the petals have fallen now}

This poem, one of the last Roethke ever wrote, is very very good, painfully so -- so acutely descriptive & epic, yet with such sweet little lines, like "What I love is near at hand, / Always, in earth and air." (see part III - my favourite)

The Far Field -- Theodore Roethke

I find parts of it just so (brutally, in places) lovely, it's both sensual and spiritual, certainly the most lovely & poignant poem of coming to terms with mortality. (I'm not one for all that raging against the dying of the light...) Sometimes when I am at my most serene, I can almost feel this kind of peace-making with finitude, with dying, being a little easier -- because of that flash of realization that nothing is really finite at all.

All finite things reveal infinitude:
The mountain with its singular bright shade
Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,
The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;
Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope,
A scent beloved of bees;
Silence of water above a sunken tree :
The pure serene of memory in one man, --
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.

(Roethke, The Far Field, Pt. IV)

I know this, exactly. & I think the poem haunts me ever more so, because this idea of union with trees & shadows & earth & air reminds me very much of things my father has said to me, on the rare occasions we have spoken about things we believe in.

& it came a heat wave...

{caragana pods, getting ready to spit their little black seeds in the heat}

{my dog, prancing, so happy that it's cool enough to finally go outside}

{not a particularily flattering picture, but i like the light, andsomehow it's exactly how i feel in the heat: dishevelled, sticky & glowing}

Songs for nights too warm to sleep:

Saw-Edged Grass -- Alina Simone (placelessness)
La Denigracion -- Bowerbirds (Danger at Sea)
Pickerel Lake -- Sufjan Stevens (Michigan Outtakes)

white asters

{maple leaf in the woods, london, on., june 2007}

{grasses & white asters, london, on., also june 2007}

Sometimes when I write poems I come up with such small little disjointed pieces it feels like I am some sort of archaeologist; I can imagine how whoever found tablets with the fragments of Sappho must have felt, trying to reassemble them. At the early stages of poem, all I have are tiny flashes, shards in the dirt that are clear yet disconnected, and I have to figure out how to re-unite them.

[fragments]

1.

dwelling in the togetherness
of our (im)perfection:

2.

we found the secret of the
heartshape wood-knot, black acacia.
days of catlike wandering & russian fairytales,
lying in the grassy chaos of the ruins:

(you know
i could never be with someone
who didn’t understand the beauty
of burnt by the sun)

3.

we are prowling for something,
& our little truths are filled with light,
in every space between the leaves,
our breathing, wind in the long grasses,
cat-tails resonate with blackbird notes
& the parallel songs
of locusts humming in the dust.

4.

something about her
makes me dream
of waking up facedown in wet grass
tongue-ful of white asters.

5.

but every time i am shaken
from that languour
by my promise of protection

all tangled in the roots of this;
to take every ache &
sun on the pool
through the willow, weeping
thick with carpglint,

braid it into your hair
& hold you without thought
of myself, or possession,

remembering the ethic
of my love

6.

don't know how
to voice the truth that's
trapped me here,

struggling in the leghold,
tender snapping of my
bones like white flowers
snaring the stems leading
to the heart;

but i am not shadowy
nor vulpine i just don't know
how to speak the words

flying away like blackbirds flushed
from the rushes, red slashes on their
wings like startled blood --

on this high hill in a year's turning...

{three little post-solstice pictures, me in all three}

Though I generally like to refrain from writing anything too rambly & revealing here, I sometimes have the urge to write things that might be a little self-indulgent, & are more of a personal record than anything else -- things that are not likely very interesting to virtual passersby. However, it was my birthday recently (well, two weeks ago) & I am going to indulge myself by talking about that birthday. I mused to myself then that he numbers seemed to be getting rather high & important-sounding... though really, to me, the chronology is quite meaningless. Really: what is a 24-year-old in my society 'supposed' to be like? What 'should' I be doing? It's really quite absurd when I think about it. Sometimes I swear I'm six years old, chasing after rabbits in the yard, spinning around... (see above for photographic evidence) Or, this evening, I am already an old baba, curled up in my living room knitting a sock, the news on mute, listening to birds sing. I am not, as it seems so many of my peers are, engaged, pregnant, or buying a condominium in the suburbs. (It seems every time I log on to bloody Facebook, I find out that a friend of a friend is getting married)

It's just so strange because I am not at that place in my life at all. I am working on my M.A., I am about to go do fieldwork in two months, I have no idea where I'll do my PhD, but I'm willing to migrate. & this birthday, I think, has somehow made me feel a little more sturdy, despite my recurring spasms of a rather frightening self-doubt. Am I bit more capable, perhaps, somehow? I accomplished a lot this year, I think. & I feel a little more aware of this sense of potential for the next years... and I am constantly awed by the opportunities that are available to me. There is truly so much before me; I am a lucky little fish with dear friends & a wonderful family, who has a lot of freedom right now to learn & experience & do so much. & I don't have to worry about down payments on a house or what a partner might think of me wanting to go to school in Scotland or do doctoral research in the Sakha Republic for an indeterminate amount of time.

On my 14th birthday (10 years ago!) I decided to emulate Emily of New Moon -- I wrote myself birthday letter, telling my future self what I envisioned myself doing by this point in my life. (I was bad & actually opened it last year, actually, because I was moving houses & was in a purging fit...) but anyhow, I am pleased to report that I am fulfilling a lot of things I had hoped for myself back then (especially in terms of my education), and I daresay my 14-year-old self would be a little bit proud of me now. I am doing what I want (even if I don't always know what exactly it is what I want!) & despite the tumultousness and uncertainty that comes with it, I am deeply glad of this. I can say I wouldn't want it any other way. I am full of that cusp-feeling right now, & full of gratefulness, and I just hope I can do justice to the abilities I've been given & do things that are good & useful & fulfilling.


The loveliest birthday poem: Poem in October by Dylan Thomas.

prairie smoke

{three-flowered avens, above the red deer river}

{lonely tree, blackstone-chungo forest area}

{ram falls}

i wanted so much for the land to heal you this time, wanted to hear it say shhh i know every tree on the hill rock on the mountain ache in your body & it would all seep away, purple blossoms dissolving to prairie smoke, campfire ashes sparking out out out into the twilight that never comes, just a rolling blanket of echoes & storms. but it wouldn't leave you, it stayed all night as thunder leapt the arching curves of the foothills -- frozen like a deer's body mid-run over the rocky slope of the bank. in the morning your bones ached rapid-white, endless blind rushing, slowly eroding.

on the forestry trunk road...

{somewhere north of Nordegg, Blackstone/Chungo Creek Forest area}

{meadow, either Elk Creek or South Ram River, above the falls}

{bluebells, campsite at the Red Deer River}

{the Red Deer River, young & still in the mountains}

{Waiparous Creek valley}

Come gather yourself from the grass, the branch, the earth.
Walk here, sleep well, on the ground that is not yours, but is yourself.

-- Ursula K. LeGuin, 'Exhortation from the Second and Third Houses of the Earth', in Always Coming Home

(Always Coming Home is a profoundly beautiful book.)

shadow & silty heat.

{me, by the river, may}

{willow blossoms, by the river, same evening}

These are old photos, from mid-May before I left for Denmark -- both of my secret stretch of riverbank on the North Saskatchewan. Here is their accompanying poem : (again, in a very early state...)

i think of you when i visit
the river, sometimes singing
when i think no one will hear.
just like the cemetery songs,
my mother spilling lemon pepper.
tearburn of khortytsya hits the earth.
another spring, & we are aging,
remembering the
old country we never knew.

by the river, the dark-eyed juncos
go fan-tailing, bursting aspen candles,
a forest of green fireworks suspended
like chandeliers; & i slip into the
giddy languor of evening, of one
who was born here & knows nowhere
else. never has to ache for home.

on the deadfall, the sound of the nuthatch
saying kék, kék.
i remember you telling me
that’s the hungarian word for blue,
sky bright as its silky underbelly.

but there were no magyar neighbours here,
you told me. no markets, no mamalyha, no
distant wreath of mountains. i remember
your eyes over the valley,
the cracked whitemud of the riverbank,
an endless sparkling, the cacophony
of wood-ducks. where is that
village violin?

you crossed the ocean too late, you said.
too old past twenty to emigrate.
after a certain time, a transplant’s
roots will never quite take. oh, they
might grow, yes, but they will
ache for some other chernozem, or
the salt of carpathian rocks.

but i am the kalyna seeds that drifted,
carried by birds, in beaks & feathers,
in your apron pockets.
my mother landed
in this ground, grew well here.
strong bones, pale branches like
you did, but a waxy sap,
a tolerance for frost.

& i think of you, passed on,
wondering if the swallows stayed
here with you, or
carried you home. followed the
flow of the sky in the flow of the light
til west became east, a slow migration
of shadow & silty heat.

i think of you when i see
the black earth of the spring fields
churned up, the luminous wind
& the scent of sweet willow honey.
it’s not yours, no, but it's a rich land
& it will nourish you:
here are my red fruits, my
petals & plumage, feeding you now
with what i am.

solstice-time

{irises, my garden...}

{flower shadows, also my garden... perhaps the midsummer tsvit paporoti?}

{ladybug on clematis leaf in the garden}

Happy Midsummer! (slightly post-Solstice, but really, traditional celebrations for the occasion are occuring this whole week...) In honour of the light hours & the presence of the sun, I have been trying to get away from my endless computer work to be outside. Warm mornings and stormy afternoons, and daily running in the river valley, hearing the locusts singing in the grasses, sweet humming of wind in the poplars, feeling as if I am inside a massive green lung at the forest bottom. Playing music again -- I'm rededicating myself to playing oboe: Polovetsian dances, the Largo from New World Symphony, Gymnopédies, the Romance from Eine Kleine... The sound is the colour of warm honey evening light melting the sidewalk, the light that goes on forever, exhaling into the dark before breathing out a sunrise again.

In two months, I'll be up north & the days still won't be getting shorter... though I'm sure mid-August in Whitehorse will already mean yellow leaves, dying fireweed & smoky nights.

Alexander Borodin's Polovetsian Dances from Prince Igor -- the Slovak Philharmonic with Daniel Nazareth, conductor. (click there for mp3!)

mostly a note to myself.

{rays shining on the vor frelsers kirke, christianshavn, copenhagen, may 25}

{wavy grasses, windmill at the moat at kastellet, copenhagen, may 20}

{chesnut flowers fallen on the cobblestone, copenhagen, may 20}

{lilacs, botanisk laboritorium, copenhagen, june 1}

So, going to Copenhagen piqued my curiousity in Mister Søren Kierkegaard's writings.
I haven't read much yet, but I must say that thus far, he refreshes me. It seems we are kindred spirits on a few points, already, e.g. existentialists who still believe in divine forces do make me Even if he gets a little melodramatic and angsty sometimes, I overall deeply appreciate his focus on emotions and feelings and how they affect our ethics. We are not little rational logic-machines! (I deal with that far too much in academia...) Anyway, currently I am starting with 'The Concept of Anxiety' (because goodness knows, that was written for me) and appreciating statements like:

"[Anxiety is] neither a category of necessity nor a category of freedom; it is entangled freedom, where freedom is not free in itself but entangled, not by necessity, but in itself."

'Freedom entangled in itself', I think, perfectly captures both the panic/dread and yet the anticipation and potential of anxiety. All in all, it resonates.

wonderful wonderful Copenhagen

{a bicycle patiently waiting for its owner, christianshavn, copenhagen, may 25 i think}

{looking down nyhavn canal, copenhagen, may 20...}

{a swan nibbling the end of a waffle cone, nyhavn canal, copenhagen, june 1}

I am missing Copenhagen now, hyggelig København... missing, among many things:

-- sitting on the edge of Nyhavn canal in the afternoon, talking with conference-people, sun on my face melting my soft is, swinging my legs over the water

-- the walk to the Dansk Polar Centre every morning, over the Knippelsbro, the nine o'clock flock of bicycles swooping down, emerging out of the fog. chats with anyone and everyone, gravel in my shoes, the scent of salt sea & lilacs

-- certain foods, especially my usual breakfast: banana-pear yogourt, hyldeblomst (elderflower) juice, sticky sweet almond pastries, & spiced green tea.

-- swans! & the constant flight of swallows, shrill canopy of calls over the canals.

-- all that intellectual ecstasy at that Italian restaurant, that red wine, smoke in my face & some of the juiciest, most inspiring & honest conversations I've ever had... being with people who are so passionate & sincere about their fields of study... who understand the importance of emotion in academia... this never fails to remind me why I love what I study.

all of the trees were in light

{st. albans kirke, kastellet, copenhagen - may 20/07}

{hyldeblomster, swan, kastellet moat, copenhagen, same evening}

{old ramparts, swan, kastellet, copenhagen, etc}

This place felt like magic; palpable & sweet & sad. Illuminated elderflowers & preening swans, & light that you could taste - you knew where all the stories came from. Behind the calm that yearning, that heart bursting, & everything he could cling to: little tin heart, fir needles, & white sea foam blossoming on the waves.

* * *

We didn't sleep too late
There was a fire in the yard
All of the trees were in light
They had no faces to show
I saw a sign in the sky
Seven swans, seven swans, seven swans
I heard a voice in my mind
"I will try, I will try, I will try
I will try, I will try, I will try"

-- Sufjan Stevens, 'Seven Swans'